The Trans-Harbour line is likely to get the air-conditioned local, as running it on the mainline is just ‘too risky’ said railway officials. This is because a cascading effect if something were to go wrong with the air-conditioned local train on the mainline would be too big a mess to handle.
The Trans-Harbour line is the least busy section on the Central Railway (CR) with only 232 services as compared to 594 on Harbour and the 838 on the mainline. “CR cannot put the train on the mainline at all because of the density of its services which cannot be disturbed. We have the same concern with the Harbour line in which the number of commuters and services too are increasing with 11 new services,” said a senior official on the condition of anonymity.
He further added, “The Trans-Harbour too had 22 new services but it still has the least number of services as compared to the other lines.”
This means that if the air-conditioned train comes across any technical snag, the effect that the disruption would have on the commuters would be minimised.
The Trans-Harbour time-table is such that there would be ample room for the experimental run of the new train, said officials. “Since there are fewer services on the Trans-Harbour line, if there is an issue with the train, the disruption will not result in too many services being cancelled also, the number of services delayed will not be too many,” added the official.
It was only on Thursday, March 17, that Union railway minister Suresh Prabhu tweeted that CR has been allotted the air-conditioned train. The train is a Bharat Heavy Electrical Limited (BHEL) make-train and is expected to arrive in the city by April, after which it will be subjected to tests before finally being run on the railway line.
